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Stephen Matthews

Stephen Matthews

When Penn State sociologist Linda Burton wanted to show the lives of welfare mothers in a way that policy makers would understand, she turned to GIS.

Burton and an army of ethnographers had been tracking more than 250 poor families in Boston, Chicago, and San Antonio for three years, gathering some 35,000 pages of field notes. But for government decision makers, as well as research colleagues who might follow up on her work, she wanted more than text as a database.

" It was the toughest visit I have ever had," Linda Burton said quietly. Burton, Penn State professor of human development and family studies, had just returned from Chicago's west side, and a public-housing high-rise of the sort that was made famous—infamous—in the 1991 book There Are No Children Here by Alex Kotlowitz.